Amity Gaige has written a flawless book. It does not contain a single false note. Playful and inventive, SCHRODER movingly depicts the ways we confound our own hearts--how even with the best intentions, we fail to love those closest to us as well as we wish we could. Eric Schroder should take his place among the most charismatic and memorable characters in contemporary fiction, and Amity Gaige her place among the most talented and impressive writers working today.
Language is a personality as well. People are different when they speak different languages.
Maybe the most provocative thing one can do - and I'm not the first one to do it - is to ask the moral and philosophical question: why are some people better than others? Why are some people more moral than others?
I believe I'm very conscious of exactly what I'm doing. I'm auditioning lines of dialogue, and I'm interrogating whether the lines would translate from Russian into English the right way. The English that results can perhaps seem somewhat more formal than colloquial, but not so formal as to feel academic.
We are taught that we can be better than we are. But is there a limit to how good we can be?
Most people will reach a point where, whatever their ideology, they will relent, or conform, and that keeps them kind of in the general mass of people. And for those who find that they can't, all of sudden they leave the general mass, they find that they become exceptions, and exceptional, and often this makes them public.
People everywhere feel differently at different times of their lives.
I spent seven years writing The Free World. There are a lot of things I accomplished there that I'm very proud of, but I didn't want to spend another seven years writing a book like that.
I think having an uncompromising ideology eventually forces you out of the norm.
When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.
In my experience of women, women have a greater capacity. Maybe women, even very pragmatic ones, are less guarded about showing emotions.
We all have some ideological quotient in ourselves. And I think it does guide who we are.
Some is, I think, the personal in any act of writing. You find yourself caught up: you start a sentence, and it becomes revelatory, not just of the character, but of you as well.
When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel. The author is aware that there's a certain amount of information she/he has to provide in order to satisfy the reader, knowing that she/he has set something up that must be paid off, but this payment must be made while maintaining fidelity to the characters.
If the fidelity [ in a book] isn't maintained, the reader will think your structure is extraneous, or superficial, or that you're trying to curry favor, or live up to the expectations of some sort of genre or structure.
When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel.
Nothing is easy in writing. I don't think for anyone. But dialogue is probably what comes most naturally to me.
I think even with women who come across with a tough exterior, the interior is the same. I think you'll find this with women around the word: some women, because of their circumstances, are forced to be tougher, forced to cultivate tougher exteriors.
I think there are differences between men and women. There is more of a softness to women than there is to men, especially when it comes to those more intimate emotions: feeling love, feeling familial connections.
Incident at Vichy, one of my favorite Arthur Miller plays, is a play in which you look at all of the different perspectives of this moral question. And it isn't so easy to decide which position is correct.
There are books like Darkness at Noon, which from the prose standpoint I don't think is a perfect book. It has flaws. But for its time, it was very politically courageous.
There are books where you can really see the moral question, which I think we answer every day for ourselves, in every interaction we have with people, to a lesser or greater degree.
I think every book is a reaction to everything you're written before, and most immediately to the book you wrote just before.
Why are some people highly principled and willing to do anything for their principles, while most of us are not? And I am willing to not only ask, but also answer the question.
It's not for the writer to say whether the thing is successful or not.
